> There are large fixed costs to running a university and these students pay way above their marginal costs.
There’s a slight silver lining to this - up until now there’s been very little motivation to reduce those large fixed costs.
There’s a slight silver lining to this - up until now there’s been very little motivation to reduce those large fixed costs.
For a hacker-news friendly analogy: the risks this causes for the unis is akin to short-term financial peril in a tech firm: so what gets cut isn't what's ultimately likely to be least valuable, but what's most risky: bye, bye moonshots and general innovation.
Besides the high fixed cost the universities are faced with unprecedented open access to information via the internet. Not all what a university does can be replaced but some stuff can. A low cost competitor is taking over part of their business - and probably the most profitable one.
It is not just that Trump made entry to the US more difficult. The cost for education went up. The competition is getting stronger. And the value delivered is decreasing due to lower social mobility. Unless one is going to the very top universities the chances to move up have decreased compared with the past. This is not so say it is not worth it but relatively it is less clear and for some subjects it became very risky.
(Karl Marx warned of this, as capitalism only sees value in what produces more value. Artistic and liberal arts value is harder to calculate, thus pointless)
But, of course, this would mean that the liberal arts would have to actually go back to teaching the Western canon, and not simply using their positions as educators to repudiate Western and European art and culture at any turn, to radicalize students and spew their ideological fantasies, to engage in censorship and stoke racial tensions, and, this should go without saying, stop committing acts of physical assault, such as smashing people in the head with metal bike-locks, when they disagree with you (Eric Clanton, Tariq Khan, Eric Canin..etc).
These are just suggestions of course, I'm sure the enlightened intelligentsia will find its way.
I know plenty a scientists who'd love to create the next game-changing thing. But philosophy, governance, debate, argument, and understanding are not aspects taught in any good regard in STEM. Or should that thing even be created?
If anything, when I think of liberal arts, I think of the Greats of Rome and Greece. I remember the ancients in India, or the rulers in China. I think of the discussions reported about the Roman Senate. Or how civilizations rise and fall and why. Or of social sciences, why people do certain things as a collective? This all is indeed logic and science, but with many more degrees of freedom and lack of understanding. Liberal Arts is essential to understanding the core of a problem, and not just the numbers and symbolics that it represents.
I looked at the same college a few months after that deployment, and realized I didn't want to subsidize dogmatic obedience. Since then it appears to have gone even further downhill.
I know plenty a scientists who'd love to create the next game-changing thing. But philosophy, governance, debate, argument, and understanding are not aspects taught in any good regard in STEM. Or should that thing even be created?
Current "liberal arts", aka feminism, SJW studies, and "who wronged me today" - those are absolutist political positions that frankly belong in a trash heap. These newer classes in specific schools only teach discord and strife. It is not the language of understanding the truth, but of victimization. They do not seek equality; instead they seek their pound of flesh.
Ive seen these arguments, especially about feminism on HN come around every 2-3 weeks, and it is the same tiring talking points. There is no meeting of the minds. There is dialectic -it just one screaming over another (with -1 mods to boot). I've avoided them as per recent because there is no resolution, and nobody seems to want any sort of meaningful change.
What I am talking of liberal arts, is that of classical liberal arts of the West and the East. It is the tools of philosophy and logic, argument and debate. It is how parties may argue and debate reasonably and uncover the truth of the matter. It is how to understand how a new invention changes society; it also shows the inventor's place in that structure.
But let's say from 10 artistic programs you're down to 8 or 6. Why is it a priori a bad thing?
Schools already compete on the quality of their specific programs - one applies to Berklee for music and to Berkeley for CS, but rarely the other way around. Instead of check boxing to meet some arbitrary criteria and teach anything from Aardvark anatomy to Zulu language with questionable levels of quality, the schools can double-down on programs they do best.